A group of developers is trying to tackle the educational app market, which has huge potential for profits, but has been hard to crack because of parent and teacher skepticism about what’s actually considered educational.

With game-based learning students learn how to solve the problems in context. They understand how the equations they are solving fit into the world. The question, “Why do I need to know this?” is rendered obsolete. It is more than just subject matter, more than just content. There’s context. Students understand how integer partitions work within a system.

By now, you’ve probably heard the buzzwords: “game-based learning” and “gamification” are pervading headlines in education coverage. Video games have always been popular with kids, but now increasingly, educators are trying to leverage the interactive power of video games for learning. Why? It turns out games are actually really good teachers.

This years’ BETT show (British Education and Training Technology - the UK equivalent of ISTE or TCEA) presented a dizzying range speakers and exhibitors, and it was set against some interesting changes in UK education… To name a few, the national curriculum now includes coding, schools should now be teaching character, or ‘grit’ alongside subjects, …

Pick up a book, magazine or screen, and more than likely you'll come across some typography designed by Matthew Carter. In this charming talk, the man behind typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia and Bell Centennial (designed just for phone books — remember them?), takes us on a spin through a career focused on the very last pixel of each letter of a font.

Anna Goldfeder's insight:

A great talk - highly recommended.

Pick up a book, magazine or screen, and more than likely you'll come across some typography designed by Matthew Carter. In this charming talk, the man behind typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia and Bell Centennial (designed just for phone books — remember them?), takes us on a spin through a career focused on the very last pixel of each letter of a font.

Gamification can be a great tool to incorporate into your classroom. Helping with student engagement and motivation, gamification is a growing trend. But for teachers who are new to gamification, incorporating it into your classroom may seem like a daunting task. Figuring out ahead of time how to introduce gamification concepts into your lessons and having specific goals in mind will make the experience a much richer one for you and your students than just gamifying concepts for the sake of it.

Those "5 Things You Need to Know About EdTech" posts seem to crop up on Twitter every couple weeks -- Tech isn't the Point of EdTech, EdTech is about Learning, EdTech is Exciting. But for those who've heard and read it all before, here's a completely different take on that headline.

Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. The format of the report is new this year, providing these leaders with more in-depth insight into how the trends and challenges are accelerating and impeding the adoption of educational technology, along with their implications for policy, leadership and practice.

Contrary to the popular image of the gamer as an awkward, socially inept loner, players are actually engaged with one another. Gamers play cooperatively. They play competitively. They share tips and tricks. They work together. The teach each other how to get better at the game.

They get to use iPads instead of three-ring binders, Wikipedia instead of a dusty encyclopedia CD-ROMs and their classrooms are more connected than ours ever were. But while new tech makes learning a more enriching experience, it also makes it a lot harder to slack off.

"Gamification is first and foremost about encouragement mechanics and the system that promotes them, while game-based learning is first and foremost about the game and its cognitive residue (whether from the game’s content, or academic content)."

"Games can stand alone as a learning activity, providing valuable information to the player and her teacher, who can intuitively characterize the evidence provided by the game. In low-stakes situations, this is perfectly satisfactory. The quality of evidence about learning gathered is more important than the analysis of that evidence.

But another reason learning scientists are interested in games is because of their potential to provide a new window into the process of learning."

Gamification is a trend that doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. Incorporating game play elements into your classroom can help to create a dynamic, interactive environment that will help get and keep your students engaged in the material and excited to learn. It sounds great, right? But every trend will see a …

According to the latest data, video for homework is on the rise; mobile computing is "beyond the tipping point"; and most kids don't use traditional computers to connect to the Internet at home. Those are just three of the major trends revealed in the 2013 Speak Up Survey from Project Tomorrow.

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